Okay, this isn't heavily groundbreaking to MUGEN, but this newly disocovered information might prove useful to many people out there. So here is my first ever, MUGEN Dev-exclusive, tutorial on MUGEN Quick Vs via Command Lines!

If you've read the MUGEN Readme, you have probably heard of this feature, the one which lets you pit two characters against each other straight from the command line without having to go through the select screen, and the whole interface. But what could be so useful about knowing the command lines, you wonder?

I started thinking how cool it would be to practice against some tough AI opponents, namely BB hood Gold. But of course, MUGEN doesn't offer a way where you can just select your character and select the opponent and go at it. The ONLY way is in Arcade or Team Arcade. And when you have around 100 characters, who wants to just cycle through and change all the order settings in your select.def JUST to have a match with ONE character?

Okay first is just the simple one on one match, simply understandable in the MUGEN readme. And FYI, you need any one of the following to do this: A Dos box, running "True" Dos, or the Run Command found in the Start menu in Windows.

For myself, I use the Run command in Windows. When doing so, you have to make sure you put the path to your MUGEN.exe first. In my case:

C:M.U.G.E.Nmugen.exe (of course in DOS, if you're already in the directory just mugen.exe and eveything after will do)

Now to do a simple one on one match, in this example you're Evil Ryu and you want the oppoent to be BB Hood, you would type:

C:M.U.G.E.Nmugen.exe -p1 evilryu -p2 bbh

The p1 and p2 are optional in THIS case. All this does (and the only thing elecbyte explains in the read me) is it will start a match with Player 1 controlling Evil Ryu and Player 2, most likely no one controlling BB Hood. So basically, this is like going into a Vs Match with P2 asleep at the controls.

Now doing the -h command after typing MUGEN.exe will display all the other commands you can apply. This is where I discovered (and some of you probably already knew) that you can actually set up AI. Using the same 2 characters, if you wanted a Vs match with you, P1, as Evil Ryu, and a computer controlled BBH you'd type

C:M.U.G.E.Nmugen.exe -p1 evilryu -p2.ai 1 bbh

Basically, the only difference is adding "-p2.ai 1" This just says it activates AI for P2.

Now I know a lot of you a probably reading this going, "Okay okay, this is basic info, we all could've done this if we wanted to by reading the Readme and typing it ourselves."

Well, it gets a little more complex as I actually discovered some things NOT mentioned or explained in either the help mode or the readme.

What if you were just so damn good, you felt like having a one-on-2 match? Yes it IS possible to set up simotaineous matches in Quick vs. Here's a similar example above, except we're adding Evil Ken:

C:M.U.G.E.Nmugen.exe -p1 evilryu -p2.ai 1 bbh -p4 evilken -p4.ai 1

As you can see, this states P1 is Evil Ryu, controlled by a human player with a P2 BBH with AI, and P4 is Evil Ken also with AI which, once run, will be BBH's partner.

IMPORANT!: You MUST have the "-p4.a1 1" command line option AFTER the Player 4 character or else it won't work (For me the character will either have no AI or the second character won't appear at all). It took me a while to figure that out.

Now it's time to add extra options. This is the easy stuff, but there are some things I noticed which I'll explain.

Stages:

The Help command line explains you can give a few extra options. These of which can be added AFTER the line with all your character data. The thing about the Command line is it's pretty smart. For stages, the default stage will be whatever's set in your MUGEN.CFG file. When you want another stage, you don't have to add "stages/stage.def", just "stage" will do. So in this line:

Same as above, except this time, the stage will look for arena96.def in the Stages directory, and that's what'll load. Pretty easy, self explanatory. Moving on.

Palettes:

Especially in characters who have special "Palette activated modes", you might want to set either your character or the computer's character. This is where it gets tricky. I haven't even FULLY figured this out yet. But from what I have so far, if you want a character to have a specific palette, look it up in the DEF file, it's asking for the #, not the name of the act file. Take the number and subtract 1. I know it's weird, but it works. In this example:

This selects BBH's shadow mode which is Pal10 according to the Def file.

And yes if you wanted Color #1, you'd put "p2.color 0". Yeah I know, weird 0_o What I get confused about is, if you leave it out, the computer will either choose the first palette (pal1) or choose the palette in pal.defaults in the DEF file of a character provided. It's confusing and if I tried it on different characters, I'd probably see differently.

Rounds:

Okay in all the examples above, if you ran these in MUGEN, you'd fight endlessly until you press ESC. But if you want to set up the round system so that it's a bit more "real" all you have to do is add "-rounds 2" at the end of the command line. This basically states that once one side has received two wins, MUGEN exits. If you don't play by typical "2 win" settings you can always change the number. Remember the number is based on how many times must either character win before the fight ends.

Well that's about it, I haven't figured out how you can make Kof-styled, Turn gameplay available, nor have I messed around with the available power and life command lines. Again, this might be useful if:

-You want to fight with a certain character against a certain CPU character, which is unavailable in the normal MUGEN interface. Especially if they're CPU only or something, and can't even be selected in watch mode.

-Testing out Stages/Characters before you add them to the select.def. When you type the character in the command line it looks in the chars/stages directory not in the select.def. Though I have also yet to figure out how to get it to work if you have multiple motifs (lifebars,sparks,etc) to choose from.

Well hope you guys find this useful anyway. I hope someone can take this info and maybe make a small frontend program with it. That would be pretty nifty!